The hospital's acting chief of paediatrics will kick off a public education campaign on Child Road Safety Day tomorrow that encourages parents to properly restrain their children while they are in a vehicle.

Dr. Bente Lundh noted seat belts and child safety seats were not mandatory but revealed that this was set to change.

She said the Bermuda Road Safety Council had drafted legislation making restraints mandatory that was expected to be tabled in the House of Assembly soon.

"This legislation makes sense,'' said Dr. Lundh whose special interest is in occupant restraint devices -- seat belts.

She said: "As paediatricians, we have been wanting car seats to be mandatory for infants and children for a long time.'' She said the King Edward VII Memorial Hospital's maternal child team decided in January that they wanted to make it mandatory for infants and children to be discharged from the hospital in appropriate car seats.

She said it was not yet hospital policy but pointed out that the team make policy recommendations for all newborns and infants in the hospital.

Dr. Lundh said the team wanted to be proactive on child safety advocacy as they did not know when Government would make it mandatory.

She noted such policies were standard practice in the US, Canada and the UK.

Dr. Lundh said she had spoken to many people who thought it was hospital policy already.

And she noted that the majority of parents already used child safety seats.

However the team's aim was to get all parents to properly restrain their children, she stressed.

Dr. Lundh s noted that the Bermuda Medical Society Road Safety sub-committee made similar recommendations to the former Government in 1994 but they were not acted upon.

One of the members of that sub-committee, Dr. Joseph Froncioni, is now chairman of the Road Safety Council and many of those recommendations have been put forward again.

Statistics show that riding unrestrained is the single greatest risk factor for death and injury among child motor vehicle occupants.

In the US, correctly used car safety seats are 71 percent effective in preventing fatalities attributable to car crashes and 67 percent effective in preventing injuries that require hospitalisation.

However, misuse is common and an estimated 85 percent of children who are placed in car safety/booster seats in the US are improperly restrained.

Dr. Lundh recommended that infants from birth to one year of age or 20 pounds in weight should be in a rear-facing infant car seat.

Once they are one-year-old or between 20 and 40 pounds they should be in a forward-facing child seat.

And from 40 to 80 pounds children should be in a belt-positioning booster seat.

Dr. Lundh said children under 80 pounds or four-foot, nine-inches tall were not big enough for a seat belt and should be in a booster seat.

These recommendations were made by the American Society of Paediatrics after data was collected from around the world.